Kronos Enabling Real-Time Workforce Management Date:   Friday , June 05, 2009 Going was getting tougher at the HR wing of Bharat Forge Limited (BFL), a global supplier of forged and machined products as this flagship company of Kalyani Group was wrestling with the task of managing its 10,000 plus diversified workforce and ensuring accurate payroll calculation with a manual system and an outdated automated system. The company wanted a unified and integrated product which will ensure their employee productivity and optimal allocation of resources. BFL stopped at Kronos, a workforce management solution provider. And Kronos Workforce Central Suite helped BFL cut down the time taken for payroll processing extensively and ensured accurate process and increased productivity. With Kronos, the project managers at BFL no more have to depend on HR staff to send them the reports on their manpower. They could access reports online and get instant access to real-time on-premise reports; exception reports like absenteeism data, late in, early out data and overtime reports. “We have been looking for a truly good integrated time and attendance solution to replace our existing system which had lots of reconciliation issues during pay run, one that could meet all our requirements and prevent the leakages in payroll and better manage labor costs centrally,” says Yogesh Zope, Vice President, IT Services, Bharat Forge. Headquartered in Boston, the U.S., Kronos is making a departure from the traditional human resources (HR) applications with mere administrative solutions, to offer a wide range of integrated solutions ranging from payroll management to the overall real time management of the workforce, all in one suite. The company has products targeted at different verticals like healthcare, retail and manufacturing. Today, there are highly complex workforce dynamics across sectors in terms of employee timings, salary, leaves and other benefits and other day to day activities. Kronos not only addresses these issues, but combines the HR administration processes with the need of ensuring the employee productivity to attain workforce optimization by providing a solution that interconnects all the aspects of human capital management. The company’s product focuses on four different aspects for achieving workforce optimization and productivity; which are planning, allocation, tracking and analysis. Planning includes decisions on how many employees have to be deployed in different projects and the timings of the project. After a meticulous plan, the assignments have to be allocated to people. The third phase namely ‘tracking’ is more into ensuring the resource productivity as it tracks whether employees are completing the allocated tasks to finish the project as per the plan. In the analysis stage, the managers examine the tracked data to rectify lapses and complement gains. All these are done using real time data. For James Thomas, Country Manager - India Operations, Kronos, India is an evolving and promising market for workforce management, which is valued at $30 to 35 million, with a CAGR of 30-35 percent. The company, which set up its development center in Noida in August 2007 and also has offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, is betting on reports that 80 percent of the Indian market has manual HR systems or silo applications that are not integrated to each other, offering it a huge business space in integrated, automated and real time HR solutions segment. Manufacturing, retail, healthcare and ITeS some of the segments the company focuses on in India. “Actually, many organisations don’t know how much extra money they are wasting on HR administration processes like payroll because of not having a proper application.,” points out Thomas. Thomas claims that 65 percent of the fortune 1000 companies are Kronos’ clients. The company has helped most of the clients to integrate its workforce management solution, which is highly configurable and flexible, to their existing ERPs, empowering them to avail the benefits of real time data. However, on the road ahead, plenty of challenges await the company. You can see one out of each five companies in India offering HR and payroll solutions, with various exciting add-ons on them. Kronos knows it takes a huge amount of dedication and drive to standout among the jostling crowd in the market.